Openote

Download

Finding the latest release…

Windows

The usual installer. Per-user, so it never asks for an administrator password.

Download for Windows

macOS

Apple Silicon and Intel. Drag it to Applications. The least-tested build, honestly: tell us what breaks.

Download for macOS

Linux

.deb for Ubuntu, Debian and Mint; .rpm for Fedora and openSUSE. Lands in your applications menu.

Download for Linux

Young, and under active development. Updates land often and one can break a feature until the next fixes it. Developed on Windows, tested on Linux occasionally, barely on macOS. What none of that can do is lose your notes: they are files on your disk in a documented format.

Your operating system will warn you. Here's the honest reason.

Openote isn't code-signed. Certificates cost a few hundred dollars a year per platform, and while the project is this young that money buys nothing you'd notice. The warnings don't mean the software is unsafe — only that we haven't paid to tell your OS who we are. Every download here is built by a public workflow from a tagged commit, and you can read both.

Windows — “Windows protected your PC”

Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for any installer it hasn't seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS — “openote is damaged and can't be opened”

macOS quarantines unsigned downloads. Copy Openote to Applications, then run this once in Terminal:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Or open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to Openote.

Linux — nothing to do

Double-click the package your system uses and it installs like any other program — Openote then appears in your applications menu. From a terminal instead, if you prefer:

sudo apt install ./openote-*-linux-amd64.deb   # Ubuntu, Debian, Mint
sudo dnf install ./openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm  # Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE

On a distro that uses neither, take the .tar.gz: extract it anywhere and run ./openote inside. No install, no root, no menu entry.

What it does

Early, but real — and honest about which parts are which.

A genuine freeform canvas. Click anywhere, put anything there, pan and zoom in every direction.
The hierarchy you know. Notebooks, section groups, sections, pages, subpages.
Pen and handwriting with pressure, plus maths that builds into real notation as you type.
An open file format. Documented, versioned, and readable without us.
Imports your OneNote notebooks — pages, images, ink, tables and tags, from real .one files.
Sync through a folder you already have. Dropbox, OneDrive, Drive, Syncthing, a NAS. No account, no server of ours.
Flashcards from your own notes — tag a line and it becomes a card, on a spaced-repetition schedule.
A planner for exam dates, deadlines, reminders and your university timetable.